WildEarth Guardians v. United States Bureau of Land Management

The Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) acted arbitrarily and capriciously when it concluded that issuance of four coal leases in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin would not result in higher national greenhouse gas emissions than declining to issue the leases. The leases extended the lives of two existing surface mines that account for approximately 19.7% of the U.S.’s annual domestic coal production. The Tenth Circuit rejected the argument that the environmental groups challenging the leases lacked standing, concluding that the plaintiffs were not required to assert a climate-related injury to challenge BLM’s analysis of climate impacts. The Tenth Circuit also said the plaintiffs retained their standing on appeal even though they had dropped their challenges regarding the adequacy of BLM’s consideration of the local environmental impacts that formed the basis for their alleged injuries. On the merits, the court held that BLM’s reliance on a “perfect substitution assumption”—that the same amount of coal would be sourced from elsewhere even if BLM did not issue the leases—to compare the greenhouse gas emissions for the no-action alternative and issuance of the leases lacked support in the record. The court also said, however, that “[e]ven if we could conclude that the agency had enough data before it to choose between the preferred and no action alternatives, we would still conclude this perfect substitution assumption arbitrary and capricious because the assumption itself is irrational (i.e., contrary to basic supply and demand principles).” The Tenth Circuit rejected, however, the plaintiffs’ contention that BLM’s failure to use “readily available” modeling tools to determine climate impact was arbitrary and capricious. In rejecting BLM’s use of the perfect substitution assumption, the Tenth Circuit distinguished the case from the Supreme Court’s decision in Baltimore Gas & Electric Co. v. NRDC, 462 U.S. 87 (1983), in which the Court deferred to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) in a matter regarding nuclear waste storage, in part because the matter was within NRC’s expertise and at the “frontiers of science.” The Tenth Circuit said BLM was not owed deference in this case because climate science was not a “scientific frontier”; the Tenth Circuit also noted that BLM had acknowledged that climate change was “a scientifically verified reality.” In a concurring opinion, Judge Baldock indicated that the court’s “assertion that climate science is settled science is, in my view, both unnecessary to this appeal and questionable as a factual matter.”

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The parties to an appeal by environmental groups of a district court’s dismissal of their challenge to federal coal leases in the Powder River Basin in Wyoming told the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals that the automatic stay provisions of the United States Bankruptcy Code did not preclude the court from considering the appeal during the pendency of bankruptcy proceedings for Peabody Energy Corporation and its subsidiaries, one of which held two of the leases at issue. The environmental groups, the United States Bureau of Land Management, and the Peabody subsidiary and two trade organizations  noted in their briefs that the environmental groups and the subsidiary had entered into a stipulation in which the groups agreed to withdraw their request for vacatur of the leases. Since the sole relief sought by the groups was a determination that the federal respondents violated the National Environmental Policy Act, including by failing to consider the leases’ impacts on the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the parties agreed that the Tenth Circuit was not required to abate the appeal.